I coltelli del vendicatore

In the ancient times, the savage and cruel warrior Hagen (Frank Ross) is chasing Queen Karin (Lisa Wagner) and her son Moki (Louis Polletin) to marry her and usurp the kingdom of her husband, King Arald (Jack Stuart). Karin and Moki are hid in a cottage in the woods living like peasants and they are protected by a stranger, the warrior Helmut (Cameron Mitchell), who is an expert in knives. Moki gets close to Helmut that teaches him how to hunt and fight and later Karin discloses to him that three years ago, her husband traveled in a ship to overseas to seek grains to his starving people. The vessel wrecked in the coast of Britain and since then they have had no news about Arald. Further she tells that Hagen was the responsible for the starvation since he had broken the truce between the kingdoms of Arald and King Rurik and killed his wife and son. Thirsty for revenge, King Rurik had invaded her kingdom with his warriors and killed the people and raped the women including her in her honeymoon, but spared the life of Arald. Helmut, who is actually King Rurik, falls in love for Karin and questions whether Moki is his son.

This is the first action movie of Mario Bava that I have seen and I found it an underrated tale of revenge and redemption. The screenplay is very well written, disclosing a dramatic story, and supported by great direction and acting and magnificent cinematography. In the end, the viewer is never sure whether Moki is the son of Rurik or Arald but the tears of Karin might indicate that she knows the truth about the fatherhood of Moki. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

Cameron Mitchell and his stunt double take on the Viking hordes in this cheaply made Mario Bava film that carries a little more emotional weight than usual. This film cost $75,000 to make, which is surely really cheap even for 1966?

The story is this: jerk Viking Hagen has just returned from exile to his home town to claim the throne from himself, as the previous King, Arald, has seemingly drowned at sea. The only way Hagen can become King is to marry Arald's wife, Karin, but she has gone into hiding to get away from him, hiding with her son in a remote cottage. Hagen has his men scour the land looking for her, and ignores the prophecy of a strange old woman that a man is on his way to kill Hagen.

One day, hunky Cameron Mitchell turns up at the cottage looking for shelter and some food, and ends up saving Karin from two of Hagen's men in a rather violent fight. Turns out Cameron is a drifter who offers his services to Karin and starts training her son to be a fierce fighter, but also falls in love with Karin and sees the kid as some sort of surrogate son. This is all heading somewhere!

Everyone has a past and it's the past that comes back to haunt the characters in this film, as Cameron seeks both revenge and redemption and is actually quite believable as a man torn between his conflicting emotions. He's also hard as nails and takes down quite a few of Hagen's men with his throwing knives, even if his stunt double has a totally different colour of hair.

You can tell this was made cheaply, due to the limited sets, most of the action on the beach taking place in the one area, and a general sparse feel to the whole film, but then again you've got Mario Bava behind the camera, so everything looks better than any big budget film made last week with the most hi-tech CGI you can imagine. Plenty of action too, mainly Cameron taking on gurff Viking types.

He also gets a good performance out of Cameron Mitchell, who is prone to hamming it up in most of his roles. Here he exudes warmth and regret and finally, resignation, and his character does go on some kind of personal journey that ends in a bitter victory.

Yours truly hasn't got any affection with the Sword & Sandal whatsoever, but hey, since it's a Mario Bava film, and since I consider him the greatest director of all times, "Knives of the Avenger" somehow became a must-see after all. I stand corrected, though, as this wasn't initially meant to be a Bava-film. It became a Bava-film when the production badly ran into trouble, and he was needed for re-writes and a timely delivery. The fact that one man was capable or replacing a fired director, alter an entire script and finish a reasonably okay film in less than a week proves once more that Mario Bava was the ultimate cinematic genius.

The plot and set-up are extremely simple, but fairly efficient. A mysterious, blond-haired warrior protects a fugitive mother and her son from a merciless gang of outlaws led by the cruel Hagen. The story is supposedly set in the Viking era, but I didn't spot anything (costumes, ships, Northern locations) to emphasize this. Bava worked with what he had available, clearly, namely a fairly good cast (with adequate performances from Cameron Mitchell and Fausto Tozzi) and violent battle sequences. Unless you have - like me - a specific interest in the work of the director, "Knives of the Avenger" is a dull and unmemorable period piece, NOT worth tracking down.

Cameron Mitchell stars in this Viking film that essentially is a traditional western plot but set in the Middle Ages. Mitchell plays the hero--a guy who comes to town and finds that a local baddie is tormenting folks. So, being a noble sort of guy, he comes to the aid of a woman and her son--not realizing that she is a queen living in hiding. While all this sounds pretty exciting, it really isn't. Despite Mitchell tossing knives about and acting manly, it's pretty dull. BUT, I really expected much worse. Considering the zillions of Samson/Hercules/Machiste Italian films (most of which were terrible), I assumed this dubbed film would be just horrible. Perhaps having the talented director Mario Bava (known for horror films) helped a bit. Still, it's far from a must-see film and is easy to skip or see if you've got nothing better to do.

This is a good film, Bava & Cameron Mitchell both do good work imo, the soundtrack is excellent & there are a couple real gems in this film regarding Bava's visual strengths. One such scene shows the bad guy galloping off linearly away from the screen zig zagging through hills descending into a valley as the soundtrack thunders & his descent has a strange visual extrapolation to it that I'm still not sure how Bava achieved, you have to see it.

Another such scene is when Mitchell reveals his face from under his helmet with the burning village surrounding him, very impressive visuals! Again, the music & Bava's commanding sense of visual style come together for a moment of perfection.

This is really Shane redone as a Viking film & it's actually quite good. I recommend it however not to neophytes of Bava, there are other obviously more well known titles in his filmography that one should start with.

At some point every Bava fan should see this film. I need to see Eric the Conqueror, that one I still have not seen, I think Bava did 3 Viking themed films. BTW he was the special effects director for Steve Reeves original 'Hercules' film!